Dakka Veteran
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The Lustrian Janissaries
Introduction.
It was a foolish offer for an educated man to accept. A voyage in a merchant ship around the Southern Sea is not a pleasure cruise. Even if one ignores the incredible profusion of Arabyan, Tilean, Estalian, and even Albionese pirates, the creatures which inhabit the Southern Sea and the Southlands are enough to make even a cosmopolitan fellow like myself shudder at the mere thought of them. The obvious choice, when the hard-eyed trader came into my office that chilly afternoon, would have been to laugh at the ignorant peasant and slam the door in his ignorant face. After all, I had a post the knowledgeable of a hundred lands would have envied and fought for: I was a Doktor of the University of Marienburg, one of the elite of the world’s scholars. I was just past thirty, and already drawing a salary which more than sufficed for my modest needs. I had no reason to leave.
I ought, I say, to have slammed the door, but the words of this low-born, weather-beaten man seduced me. He spoke, in an accent that I (though an educated man) could not quite place, of far-flung shores, of new cultures and exotic tongues, of wild creatures the men of this cold, misty land could never hope to encounter.
He conjured in my mind visions of speeches before the great universities of in Nuln, Marienburg, and Remas, where those dusty old men who considered themselves my superiors (ha!) would gaze upon me in open-mouthed wonder at my discoveries.
He spoke, most of all, of riches. He tempted me with a wealth to which, though my singular gifts more than merited it, I could never have aspired in my old life.
And so I agreed, and signed my name, in my elegant, educated script, to his rough parchment. I agreed to provide clerical work –a silly waste of my talents.
The parchment did not state, since it would have been quite unhealthy to admit it, that the real reason to accompany the expedition was my not inconsiderable mastery of the arcane arts.
I do not believe in any particular god. I have always found the imperial cults of Sigmar and Ulric to be, despite the touching devotion the ignorant rabble show them, to be mere tools in the hands of the mighty. The thought of a happy afterlife is useful to steel the miserable peasants for their rightful purpose – that of standing between educated and cosmopolitan men and the howling hordes of those who would wipe us out. I studied the religions of the Old World as phenomena, as subject, perhaps, to their own strange form of mathematics in the ways that they moved the minds and actions of men.
And yet, when I look back upon all that has befallen me since that day, it is hard to escape a grim sensation of some brooding disfavor wreaking ill upon my life.
One more ignorant than myself might term it a curse.
But I have ruminated enough. To give this account a frame, I will say that my name is Reinhard von Witzleben. I have shown you what I was, all those years ago. These pages will show you what I have become.
Chapter One
I will say little of the months it took us to travel around the fringes of the Old World. It was cold and rainy, and there was little for me to do but keep the ship’s log in decent order and compose suitably compassionate missives for the families of those crew who succumbed to the hazards of our voyage. On a few occasions, ships somewhat worse-kept than our own well-found vessel drew menacingly near, but the rogue traders of the Southern Sea are not noted for being easy targets. When they caught a glimpse of our cannons, our volley gun, and the crew lining the gunwale armed with a dizzying profusion of small arms, they invariably beat a hasty retreat, to jeers from our rabble of foul-smelling seamen.
I will say little more of the additional months we spent on the sun-drenched Southern Sea, making our way from port to port. I saw much in those days which astonished me at the time, and learned the rudiments of the Arabyan tongue. I collected a massive chest of samples of all sorts of creatures, and catalogued them according to a system of my own devising. Had our voyage ended differently, it would no doubt have become the standard for the learned of the world.
I will not speak of this interlude, I say, because my narrative deals principally with how I came to my present position.
After a fruitful 8 months of trading, which saw even the lowliest crewman amass a not inconsiderable fortune, we left the port of Magritta in Estalia with a load of fine Estalian warhorses to begin our homeward voyage. As we attempted to weather the final headland and make our way into the Great Ocean, a storm came.
I have said that I believe in no god. However, if any does exist, may he curse that storm with the mightiest curses in his ken.
Men who had sailed those seas for forty years and more have since told me that they have never seen a storm of such fury, nor one that lasted so long, nor one whose winds changed direction so unpredictably. For my part, despite my vast knowledge, I had never conceived of such a fury.
We fled out of sight of land scudded for days under a single small sail. It was on the third day that the first man died, his fatigue (for none of us was sleeping much, least of all the seamen) causing him to fall from a yard into the churning sea.
He was a low-life peasant scum, incapable of writing so much as his own name, and no doubt the Old World was better off without him. He was the first man to whose death I had ever been a witness. No doubt that is why I still remember his screams so vividly.
He was not the last to die. It was as if the storm were a beast that had smelled blood. It lashed us with redoubled fury, and a few hours later our foremast snapped like a twig in the hands of a careless child. The timing could not have been more wretched; I was just stepping gingerly from my stateroom into the storm’s full fury. A hawser snapped under the sudden, intense strain, and its whipping end caught me full on the temple, plucking me out of the storm into the arms of a merciful oblivion.
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